At CES 2026, the AI chip maker’s director of adtech of digital marketing industries cuts through the hype to explain how AI is reshaping creativity, agency models and publishing – from agentic systems and SaaS marketing to why speed, not spectacle, is the real disruptor.
Jamie Allan
CES has a habit of exaggeration. Big screens, bigger claims and enough future-gazing to make you forget how hard most of this stuff actually is. Which is why it was refreshing to catch up with Jamie Allan at CES 2026 – someone unusually well-placed to talk about both the promise and the practical grind of where marketing, technology and creativity are heading next.
Allan runs industry strategy across adtech, streaming and sports at Nvidia. He’s spent the last few years working with everyone from legacy adtech players to startups founded by the original architects of programmatic advertising. He also happens to be a former photographer, which means he understands, instinctively, why so many creatives feel both excited and unsettled as tools, workflows and even job descriptions are being rewritten.
“I think the creative side was the first area everyone got excited about,” he says, “because we can generate content in ways that we never could before. But it’s taken some time for that to settle into a real collaboration between technology and creative. You can’t create good creative without good creatives.”
That distinction matters because, while AI has been framed – lazily – as a threat to creativity, Allan sees the opposite playing out in practice. The best work, he says, still comes from “the most creative people in the world,” with AI doing what it’s best at: accelerating, augmenting and removing friction.
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Four years ago, when Nvidia was still a curiosity for many in advertising, few people grasped the depth of the problems AI would be applied to. “I don’t know if there was enough understanding of how hard the problems really are,” Allan admits, particularly when it comes to marketing data, causality and proving real impact.
That’s now changing. He points to the emergence of companies tackling these challenges head-on and the growing willingness of CMOs to work across IT, security and legal teams – something that simply didn’t happen at scale before.
“One of the first C-suite groups to really embrace these technologies has been the CMO office,” he says. “But the forward-thinking CMOs realized pretty quickly that they needed to work with the CIO, the CISO, legal – because if you want to deploy these tools properly, you can’t do it in a silo.”
It’s a subtle but important shift: marketing becoming more operational, more technical and more accountable – not less creative.
Where Allan is particularly blunt is on the future shape of marketing businesses themselves. The rise of SaaS in marketing, he argues, isn’t a fad – it’s a correction.
“Nearly everything else inside a brand already runs through SaaS or platforms,” he says. “Operations, finance, email – it makes sense that marketing tools and agency capabilities start moving the same way.”
What’s changed is that AI – particularly agentic AI – makes those platforms far more powerful, and far easier to deploy. That’s why agencies, consultancies and integrators are all converging on similar territory: building tools, not just selling hours.
“You can see it with WPP, with Accenture, with Monks,” Allan notes. “They’re building SaaS tools that can be deployed into organizations – not just service models. That conversation about the agency business model changing? This is what it looks like in practice.”
For Nvidia, the role isn’t to build those products itself, but to enable the ecosystem. Its recently expanded Nemotron family of models – announced at CES – is designed to give developers smaller, specialised building blocks rather than monolithic, general-purpose systems.
“The media industry is made up of lots of small problems,” Allan explains. “Brand safety. Media buying. Sports intelligence. Content understanding. Each one needs a specialist agent, not a giant model that knows everything.”
Allan’s background as a photographer gives him little patience for the idea that AI somehow diminishes human creativity.
“Style, taste, what a creative sees – those are uniquely human,” he says. “These tools don’t replace that. They augment it.”
In fact, he believes AI may unlock creativity in people who were previously excluded by complex tools and technical barriers. “We’ve gone from pen and paper to software that almost requires a PhD to use,” he says. “Now the tools are getting simpler again. The mind is the creative part.”
It’s a point echoed by platforms like Canva and Adobe, which aren’t trying to replace creatives so much as expand who gets to be one.
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If there’s a warning in Allan’s thinking, it’s about speed. Not hype cycles – but the compression of time between research, product and deployment.
“Pre-ChatGPT, an academic would release a model and only other academics would notice,” he says. “Now a model gets posted on LinkedIn and everyone knows about it. Developers can productize almost immediately.”
That pace, he argues, is why AI hasn’t faded like XR or crypto. Four years on, it’s still the dominant conversation – at CES, Cannes and everywhere in between.
“Days matter. Weeks matter. Months matter. If you stagnate in the technologies you’re aware of, you’re very quickly behind.”
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Three years from now, Allan expects many long-promised ideas – real personalization, better data utilization and more relevant advertising – to actually start working. Not magically, but because the infrastructure is finally catching up.
For publishers, the implications are even more profound. He imagines a future where content isn’t just discovered through search, but surfaced through agentic networks – where trusted sources are queried directly.
“The value is in giving people a reason to come back,” he says. “Not just asking a chatbot, but getting a curated experience – context, history, perspective.”
In that world, the role of media isn’t diminished. It’s sharpened.
Which brings us back to CES. Amid the robots, the demos and the spectacle, Allan’s view is oddly grounded. Marketing isn’t being replaced by AI. It’s being re-engineered – towards software, systems and ecosystems that reward clarity of thought as much as creativity of execution.
Or, as he puts it more simply: “Our question is always the same. How can we help?”
Nvidia